Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.

We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.

All of us are much more human than otherwise

If you have to maintain self-esteem by pulling down the standing of others, you are extraordinarily unfortunate.

When people approach you angrily, you take them very seriously, and, if you're like me, with the faint suggestion that you can be angry too, and that you would like to know what the shooting is about

The supply of interpretations, like that of advice, greatly exceeds the need for them.

It may be possible through detachment, to gain knowledge that is 'useful' but only through participation is it possible to gain the knowledge that is helpful.

Everybody has a great deal of experience in living. But no one lives in anything like the highest style of the art and it is very disconcerting to notice how badly one lives in the sense of the extent to which fatigue and other discomforts are connected with one's important dealings with other people.

I do not believe that I have had an interview with anybody in twenty-five years in which the person to whom I was talking was not annoyed during the early part of the interview by my asking stupid questions.